As editor of The Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racists we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, The Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, The Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," by Ernst Rüdin, Hitler's director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene.  

The project's racist intent is beyond doubt. "The mass of significant Negroes," read the project's report, "still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes...is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit."

In 1992 Nicholas Von Hoffman argued in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Free cheap abortion is a policy of social defense. To save ourselves from being murdered in our beds and raped on the streets, we should do everything possible to encourage pregnant women who don't want the baby and will not take care of it to get rid of the thing before it turns into a monster... 

Later that same year, the White House received a letter from the Roe v. Wade co-counsel Ron Weddington, urging the new president-elect to rush RU-486 -- the morning-after pill -- to the market as quickly as possible. Weddington's argument was refreshingly honest:

[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged as discriminatory, mean-spirited and... well... so Republican. 

[G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . , . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery . . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don't have a lot of time left.

How, exactly, is this substantively different from Margaret Sanger's self-described "religion of birth control," which would, she wrote, "ease the financial load of caring for with public funds . . . children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation"? 

Abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined. African Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions. That rate has held relatively constant, though in some regions the numbers are much starker; in Mississippi, black women receive some 72 percent of all abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nationwide, 512 out of every 1,000 black pregnancies end in an abortion. Revealingly enough, roughly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood's abortion centers are in or near minority communities.

Some people ask what harm there is in gay marriage. After all, they claim, the homosexuals are hurting anyone (but perhaps themselves). This naive perspective fails to see the political and legal strategy of homosexuals, and it fails to appreciate the ramifications of acknowledgement and affirmation. 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91486340&sc=emaf

This is something you must read or listen to. There is a coming storm -- indeed, it is here -- and homosexuals are winning many court cases that force acknowledgement, affirmation and virtual promotion of their deviation. We know this already, of course, but this program caught my attention. The audio is about 8 minutes long. The article is a transcript. 

My worldview "teeth" were cut on this book. I transferred to Bryan College as a second year student in the fall of 1994. My decision to transfer was based on sports, and I had little knowledge about the school itself or its emerging emphasis on Biblical worldview. What I discovered was an institution committed to a worldview approach to education and to training Christian leaders in all areas of life. This commitment was due in large part to the vision and leadership of its president, Dr. William E. Brown.

Bill is one of those rare college presidents whom students love to hear speak in chapel; in fact, his were rarely skipped. I learned from Bill the importance of understanding and engaging culture, that I could not withdraw from the world that I was trying to reach with the Gospel, and that people were never my enemy. Bill's invitation a year after I graduated from Bryan to return and lead the "Worldview Team" ministry that he had started essentially put my life on its current trajectory.

Dr. W. Gary Phillips was the first professor I encountered at Bryan- the class was called "Biblical Worldview." At the time, I had no idea what the word "worldview" even meant, but the class was life-changing for me. I learned that Christianity was to be applied to every area of life and culture, and that thinking was a Christian thing to do.
I went on to take several more classes from Gary, and I left each one changed. In most of his classes, I kept two sets of notes: one for what I needed to know for the test, and another for what I knew I never wanted to forget. His classes awakened my mind and forged the basis of my worldview.

It would be hard for me to quantify the extent to which these men have shaped my thinking. Now, I teach on Biblical worldview at Bryan College, at Summit Ministries programs, and in other contexts whenever I can. More than once over the last several years, I have supposed myself to have stumbled onto some new revolutionary truth, only to remember later that I had actually heard it first from Gary or Bill.

This is why I did not hesitate when Gary asked me about being involved in an update of this book. There is an extensive, and growing, body of evangelical literature on worldview, but in my view, this book remains unique. There are excellent books that compare worldviews (i.e. Jim Sire's The Universe Next Door), there are excellent books that contrast the Biblical worldview with other worldviews (i.e. David Noebel's Understanding the Times), and there are a few excellent books that help one construct a Biblical Worldview (i.e. Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth).

What Making Sense of Your World offers is a basic, accessible introduction to Biblical Worldview that covers all of these aspects of worldview thinking. Part One compares the basic worldviews, Part Two contrasts (and seeks to defend) the Biblical Worldview with the others, and Part Three constructs a biblical worldview in four key areas. This book is an overview; the Christian thinker is invited to continue his or her study through the recommended readings at the end of each chapter--an ongoing task Paul labels the "renewing" of our minds (Romans 12:2).

I am happy to announce the release of the revised edition. You can purchase it through the Summit webstore.

Now, Frank is looking for others, who would like to be trained to teach this apologetics material. This August, Frank will be holding the CrossExamined Instructor Academy. This training conference will be held at Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, NC and will feature instructors like Frank, Greg Koukl and Brent Kunkle of Stand to Reason, and other top apologists who will teach and coach you in compelling apologetics.

More information can be found here.

A little over a hundred years ago, theologians James Orr and Abraham Kuyper "spoiled the Egyptians" by redefining and then claiming the worldview concept to talk about the battle between Christianity and "modernism" (i.e. secularism or atheistic humanism). The only strategy worth embracing, they suggested, was returning to a full understanding of Christianity which saw all of life and the world from Christian assumptions. At the time, they were speaking to a church that had embraced tenants of German pietism, American "holiness", and liberal theology - all of which (though in very, very different ways) limited Christianity to speaking only to personal lifestyle choices and "spiritual matters" - with nothing to say on issues of science, "fact", culture, or reason.

It was slow going, but it is hard to deny that the worldview concept has caught on. Somewhere in the late 20th century, the teaching of Francis Schaeffer, James Sire, David Noebel, and more recently Chuck Colson connected. The word "worldview" is actually popular these days!

(A brief excursion... The worldview concept still seems largely absent in the local church where Christianity often is relegated to only the "spiritual" stuff: personal salvation, private morality, and our "experience with God." In his book and elsewhere, Naugle rightly notes that while worldview has caught on in educational institutions and para-church groups, worldview has not escaped its reputation as being "too intellectual" and moved into the local church. Thus, we are currently in a strange place as far as all this goes. There are numerous books, websites, programs, conferences, camps, studies, etc on worldview - just do a google search for "Biblical worldview" or "Christian worldview" and you'll see what I mean. On the other hand, I am consistently amazed at how revolutionary the idea is for so many people who attend our Summit programs, or who sit in the pews at churches where I speak, or who attend conferences where I give seminars.)

Of course, popular can be good, bad, or both. Herein lies my grief. Words that become popular (1) cease to be carefully and consistently defined, and (2) become culturally captive. Worldview is no exception. Since Orr and Kuyper, worldview has been well-used by Christian thinkers in an apologetic sense ("Christianity is true!"), a comparative sense ("Christianity is better!"), and a constructive sense ("Christian assumptions should shape our view of everything!"). The best books do all three - i.e. Noebel's Understanding the Times and Phillips and Brown's Making Sense of Your World.

Today, however, "worldview" is far too often a mere catchword, a word hijacked so one may complain about everything they don't like about the world, the church, and other Christians- without being bothered by any substantial reasoning from distinctly Christian assumptions. For example, the blogging phenomenon makes anyone with a computer into an expert - whether they have wisdom and understanding or whether they merely hold a grudge or have an axe to grind. Despite the ease of "getting our ideas out there", I cannot see how "worldview" blogging somehow justifies being lazily simplistic in analyzing ideas, non-Biblical in confrontation, or intentionally incomplete (or even misleading!) in our caricature of another's views.

The important contribution of worldview thinking has always been its potential to engage ideas at the level of fundamental assumptions - i.e. what are the basic ideas about life and the world upon which we should build our view of life and the world as Christians? Where are our foundations unBiblical? And, what are the basic mistakes others make in their assumptions? When we fail to start here, our cultural engagement becomes reactionary rather than sharp and thoughtful. Reactionary thinking is always oriented around the mistake rather than the truth. Os Guinness has suggested that this is one of the fatal flaws today that guts the church's ability to really live out the Gospel in modern culture.

Reactionary thinking is a huge problem in the world of Christian blogging. It is far too common to find the setting up and beating of "straw men" positions in the guise of "defending the truth", the declaring of guilt-by-association in the name of "maintaining purity", the utilizing of shoddy thinking while pretending to offer strong arguments, and the intentional misleading of readers on another's views in order to proclaim "see, I told you they were dangerous."

The result ranges from the embarrassing to the dishonest. In the last few years, I have seen Christians practically argue for modernism while trying to argue against postmodernism, call one of the great critics of postmodernism a closet emergent, misquote a Christian leader's recommended book list to make it appear as if he recommended the ideas of new age thinkers, and justify uncharitable blogging practice by offering an interpretation of particular Scriptures on confronting believers that is completely foreign to any interpretation in church history.

My prayer is that Summit will continue to offer the best Christian worldview resources available without forgetting that our worldview applies to our means as much as it does our message. It would be a shame if the worldview concept lost its credibility due to being abused and wrongly applied. So, if we are ever guilty of these sorts of injustices, please let us know.

This morning, I was struck with how this really happens. I receive a daily email from T.M. Moore, dean of the Wilberforce Forum's Centurions Program. This morning, Moore clarified for me that, in reality, institutions don't drift. People drift, and therefore institutions drift.

Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-Fil-A, would agree. I heard Mr. Cathy speak to a group of students recently, and he stated something like this bluntly to them: "Businesses don't fail. People do." He also said, "There is no such thing as business ethics. There is only personal ethics." I wonder how many would consider this too simplistic. Certainly, there are external factors beyond our control. On the other hand, vernacular can easily remove the responsibility from our own shoulders where it belongs. For example, do marriages collapse? Does love cease? Do churches split? Or, do people?

We have stewardship over institutions. And, it is the stewardship we exercise over our lives which inevitably play out in those institutions. Moore's thoughts from this morning are too solid not to quote:

I've been reading again of late George Marsden's, The Soul of the American University, which details the decline of American higher education from its foundations in the Gospel and the Biblical worldview to its largely secular and unbelieving condition today. Institution by institution, each generation of Christian leaders made decisions and took actions which opened their college or university to the influences of secularism, sapping the foundations of faith and turning loose the mavens of modernity to rewrite the agend of learning and the framework of truth. I shake my head in disbelief that good men could have been so unaware of what they were doing, but then I am led to wonder about my own life, the care I take of this temple of the Spirit and truth entrusted to me: what am I doing, day by day, that I either consider to be harmless to my soul or that I simply have not assessed with sufficient scrutiny to know that it is tarnishing the gold of truth and breaking apart the foundations of faith I otherwise hold so dear? What influences am I allowing into my mind and heart, to what priorities do I defer without thinking, and what practices do I follow of which I will be thoroughly ashamed and without explanation on the day I stand before the Lord? Schaeffer wrote that it is the influences of the unbelieving age, which we grant entry to our souls without recognizing their destructive influence, that will rob us of the reality and power of our faith. May God give us eyes to discover the ways we are granting such influences entry into our temples of His Spirit, and may we send them packing - like Nehemiah evicting Tobiah (Neh. 13.4-9) - before their corroding power works its dire effects.

You can subscribe to Moore's daily email here.

Still, much more common and at least as unfortunate (perhaps even more so) is the idea that Christians are not to be "earthy" at all. This comes when "earthy" is misunderstood as "worldly" in a way which separates the spiritual and physical in a sort of pseudo-gnosticism. This is something quite prevalent among contemporary Christians and owes its origins more to Greek philosophy than to Biblical teaching.

In the Christian economy of things, the division is not between the spiritual and physical (which God pronounced "very good" in the Garden), but between Creator and Creation. The Creator is sovereign, and He created a world in which physical and spiritual co-exist as a metaphysical whole (especially the imago dei: "...and God formed man out of the dust of the ground [physical], and breathed into him the breath of life [spiritual], and man became a living soul [imago dei])."

What has brought these thoughts to mind is a particularly intriguing, though brief, article in the latest Touchstone (April 2008, p.7) in which Peter Leithart recalls that many early pagan critics of Christianity, including Alcinous and Celsus, accused Christianity of being too "earthy." In pagan spirituality, one had to transcend the physical in order to commune with the gods and goddesses which were of a higher, spiritual reality instead. Of course, in a theistic worldview, God is the ultimate highest reality as creator, with created things being both spiritual and physical. And then, the story goes, God enters the created realm by becoming man!

For these pagans, it was a scandalous thing that God had not only created the physical as good, but had also become flesh (the ultimate endorsement of the physical as legitimate reality!)! This meant that truth, beauty, and goodness were not merely disembodied concepts existing outside of the real world of the human predicament. Leithart writes,

Instead of ascending past sensible things to the intellectual realm to find God, Christians said that God could be found in this world, since he had made himself known in flesh, and continues to give himself in water and wine, bodies and bread.

According to Leithart, the pagans complaint was that "those early Christians (were) so earthly minded they could be no heavenly good." It is unfortunate that this critique could hardly be leveled against us today. While we build insulating churches complete with our "Christian second life" versions of arcades, bookstores, coffee shops, restaurants, support groups, bands, radio stations, and clothes, the things of earth become strangely dim - and we like it that way.

We do Christianity injustice by our modern-day dualism. The Christian life is not about valuing the spiritual over the physical, it is about embracing the Lordship of the Creating and Redeeming God of the Universe over all realms of existence.

Well, Drew loved the Summit - so much so that he not only returned the following year, but also made his little brother come, too! This summer, I am told, we will meet his sister at one of the TN sessions.

While I always love to hear stories about Summit grads, this one is a favorite - even if we cannot claim many credit for Drew's success in real estate (he was doing all of this pre-Summit!). One key thing in Drew's story is worth highlighting: his definition of ministry. Drew, and his family, understand that ministry is not confined to church or missions work - it can and should be anything we are involved in.

Don't get me wrong, it is not less than pastoring, being a missionary, or para-church work. It is just that it is, and should be, so much broader than that. There is no secular/sacred divide. Biblically, all Christians are ministers, and all of life is ministry.

Gary Phillips, my college theology professor and still one of my heroes, underscored this to me time and again in various courses and lectures, as he quoted Paul's job description of the leaders of the church (from Ephesians): "to equip the saints for the work of the ministry."

Later my understanding of this idea was expanded in the concept of vocation, that God has gifted and equipped us to be human in the way He created us, and not just to do a job. In other words, we are all called to the ministry, and the legitimate expression of this in our lives is unique to how God has designed and gifted us in light of the current needs of our culture.

My favorite line on this is from Frederick Buechner; "The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." Drew gets this.

In fact, Drew and his family now use his success to teach others. You can find out about their work, including their upcoming conference in Huntsville, AL, here.

"Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information."

He, of course, is getting blasted for suggesting babies are punishment (and rightfully so). While I was surprised he actually said it, one need not look far to see examples of this mindset. This is inevitable in a culture that values convenience, efficiency and choice (see my last post).

Last week, for example, several news sources reported on yet another lawsuit from parents who did not get the baby they wanted/ordered. Through IVF, several embryos were produced for this Australian couple. Their physician then eliminated (or, killed?) all the male embryos (they thought!) through an embryonic sex selection procedure. They wanted a girl, since most of the boys born on the mother's side of the family were at high risk to inherit a potentially life-threatening blood disorder.

However, instead of the girl they expected, they got a boy - and he has the blood disorder.

While this case is more noble than the other "wrongful birth" suits I have seen - the case filed by the lesbian couple for getting twins instead of only one baby, the case by the parents who would have had an abortion if they had know their baby was going to be handicapped, and the white/dominican couple who through an implantation mix-up gave birth to a black baby - what is behind them is the same: a secular understanding of life and the world lived out in a culture addicted to convenience, efficiency, and choice.

You can see this in the language we now use to refer to childbearing. It is no longer "procreation" (i.e. following in the footsteps of the Creator); it is "reproduction" (factory language in referring to image bearers...). With that sort of talk, it is no wonder so many get so upset when they do not get the "product", er baby, that they want.

Of course there are other consequences as well. In short, because secularism assumes no universal moral understanding, sexual morality is a private concern only. It thus may be and inevitably is divorced from any concept of what it was designed for. Sex becomes disconnected from its designed context (marriage) and its consequence (babies). The result? Fewer people get married and even fewer have babies than ever before.

And, then Europe dies...

By the way, a great article on the purpose of sexuality can be found here.